Political Debate

Our group owners are MissSweetPea, Brooke (LooseMeat), meganfae and PinkElephant. Please feel free to send one of us a note if you have a question or concern, or see a post that is in violation of our guidelines.

This is a debate board, so expect your ideas to be challenged. We will step in if it escalates to personal attacks, but it is fine for discussion to get heated, if it stays on topic. If you don't like what someone is saying, debate it!

Guidelines specific to Political Debate:

- Please keep posts on subject matter, and do not make it about individual posters. Posts meant to demean other posters are not acceptable.

- No posting of disturbing, graphic pictures. Please use a bit of common sense and sensitivity. This is first and foremost a parenting site, and the content of this board should be entertaining, not disturbing or upsetting. We don't need to see graphic pictures to know the importance of a situation, and honestly if you need to post a horrifying picture to make your point, you are not making your point very well.

- Please do not start a thread by copying an e-mail forward. These threads never lead to good discussion and usually devolve into an attack-fest within the first few posts. If you get an e-mail forward that makes you think, please just post your own thoughts rather than the thoughts of your brother's co-worker's dogwalker's neighbor's son. We will lock the e-mail forward threads as soon as we are made aware of them.

- Please include the word "abortion" in the title of any thread on the subject. Those who are not interested in another abortion debate can simply skip right over that thread. In addition, please do not bring up abortion on unrelated threads. Start a new thread with the appropriate title, please!

-Don't mention putting or suggesting to someone to be placed on ignore. Ignore is like fight club. You don't talk about it.

Please follow the BBC Community Guidelines:

1. Personal attacks are unacceptable. As a general rule, a personal attack is when you make it personal. Attacking concepts and ideas is fine, attacking the person is not.
Personal attacks are postings, photos, journals, comments, or other content that insult, demean, embarrass or humiliate another member of our community or group of members of our community based upon her or their character, decisions, personal choices or beliefs.
Examples:

Personal attack: The members of the Advanced Toddlers group are self-deluded crazies.
Not a personal attack: I was reading the Advanced Toddler group and I don't understand the desire to focus on baby milestones.
Personal attack: Did you see what Member X posted! I'm totally shocked. Don't you think she's a fool?
Not a personal attack: Recently a mom I saw did something that I thought was foolish. I felt completely shocked. What is your reaction?

2. Hate-speech is not permitted. Please click on the "BBC Community Guidelines" link above for babycenter's definition of hate speech.

3. Do not deliberately disrupt the community.

Babycenter has added to this guideline a rule that profanity is not to be used in thread or journal titles that appear on public boards. If your title includes profanity, we will PAN you asking you to edit your title.

4. Bullying or harassment will not be tolerated.

5. Illegal activity is not allowed on the site. The way this one seems to come up here is copyright violations. Copyright violations are taken seriously by babycenter, as they can become a legal issue. If you would like to quote an article or other source in your post, please provide a link to the article, and only copy a few lines of it. If it is a longer article, you can copy up to two paragraphs into the post, in order to highlight an important part. If you violate copyright guidelines, we will send you a note asking you to correct it.

6. No XXX. We're not too strict with this one. Obviously don't post porn or something, but swearing is fine.

7. Don't reveal personal information or private content “ yours or theirs. This includes the content of private notes, and personal, identifying information about our members.

8. No SPAM. You can have a link to your business, blog, or whatever in your siggy, but can't use your posts to recruit or call attention to it.

If one of your posts is in violation of guidelines, you may receive a note from one of us asking you to edit it, to give you a chance to just take out an offensive line or two but save the rest of your post. If the post is a clear violation, we may delete it without sending a note.

We are trying to act in the best interest of our members, and that sometimes means using our judgment to delete a post. We reserve the right to delete any post we believe is intended to disrupt the community or harass another member. We hope that everyone can respect that and understand that our goal is to encourage a good debate and positive community experience.

We hope this will be a place for productive debate, where people can learn about all sides of the issues. We would like to stay as hands-off as possible but we will step in when we feel it is warranted....so help us keep the moderating to a minimum by adhering to Board guidelines and BBC guidelines.